the Chinese who are continually at work in the fields.

We spent a week trapping about Yen-ping and although we caught a good many
animals they were almost always stolen together with the traps. We had this
same difficulty in Yün-nan as well as in Fukien. None of us had ever seen
natives in any part of the world who were such unmitigated thieves as the
Chinese of these two provinces. The small mammals are hardly more abundant
than the larger ones for the natives wage an unceasing war on those about
the rice paddys and have exterminated nearly all but a few widely
distributed forms.




CHAPTER IV


A BAT CAVE IN THE BIG RAVINE

A few days after our arrival in Yen-ping we went with Mr. Caldwell and his
son Oliver to a Taoist temple seven miles away in a lonely ravine known as
Chi-yuen-kang. The walk to the temple in the early morning was delightful.
The "bamboo chickens" and francolins were calling all about us and on the
way we shot enough for our first day's dinner. Both these birds are
abundant in Fukien Province but it is by no means easy to kill them for
they live in such thick cover that they can only be flushed with
difficulty.

Early in the morning we frequently heard the francolins crowing in the
trees or on the top of a hill and when a cock had taken possession of such